The present invention relates to an electronic file system and associated method for use under environment of a widely spread operating system (OS), for example, Windows (a trademark of Microsoft Corporation of the United States), for storing image information into storage media, and retrieving and outputting required images from the stored image information. More particularly, the present invention relates to an electronic file system which has device(s) capable of performing parallel processing of image data in order to achieve high speed image processing and so on, and an electronic filing method associated therewith.
In general, conventional electronic file systems available on the market have their hardware and software configured based on their own architectures, as described in JP-A-5-2456. Therefore, an extremely expensive apparatus dedicated to electronic filing must be purchased for realizing the electronic filing.
For the reason set out above, the utilization of hardware and software available in the personal computer market has not been considered for building an electronic file system. The above-mentioned dedicated electronic file system, although it is highly expensive, is not designed to perform additional functions other than those of the electronic file system. The additional functions include, for example, a word processor, a spreadsheet software, and so on which may be executed by a personal computer. The conventional electronic file systems have thus presented poor versatility and extendibility as a computer.
Moreover, when an electronic file system is built so as to be controlled under a non-preemptive operating system, which is widely used for general purpose, in order to reduce the price of the system, a scanner connected to the system as an input device, an optical disk drive employed as a data storage device, and so on can only be operated substantially in series, resulting in a slow processing speed of the system.